Astera Labs unveiled the latest line in its Scorpio network switch portfolio, designed to provide minimal latency for large-scale clusters.

Shipments of its Scorpio X-Series 320 have commenced, with Astera viewing it as a replacement for multiple legacy switches and that it can support large-scale upgrades in a single hop.

Specialized engines within the new switches can be configured through the vendor’s Cosmos flagship software platform. The Hypercast data replication engine configures packet destination groups for improved efficiency, while In-Network Compute is designed to reduce the time and computational resources lost when moving data between the graphic processing unit (GPU) and other system components to free up accelerator usage.

Astera claims the software-defined acceleration engines double collective operations while also improving time-to-first-token and tokens-per-watt performance in scale-up environments.

“The frontier models driving today’s most demanding AI applications require connectivity infrastructure that keeps pace with the accelerators powering them,” Astera Labs CEO Jitendra Mohan noted. “The Scorpio X-Series 320 Lane high-radix AI fabric switch replaces multiple legacy switches to enable larger scale-up cluster sizes in a single hop and reduce overall latency.”

Astera also announced it’s expanding its Scorpio P-Series PCIe fabric switch family. Astera said the line now encompasses configurations ranging from 32 to 320 lanes in order to give data center operators, hyperscalers, and neoclouds a variety of options to fit their switching needs.

The modular switch line debuted in late 2024, and is specifically optimized for PCI Express (PCIe) 6 platforms like Nvidia’s Blackwell-based MGX.

“As AI moves into production, the bottleneck is shifting off the GPU and into the fabric that connects these systems. The pace of accelerator refresh is exposing how rigid many of these interconnects are, especially the closed ones, where every upgrade turns into a forklift decision,” Patrick Moorhead, chief analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, noted. “With the broadened Scorpio family, Astera Labs is pushing toward a more open, high-radix approach that reflects how AI clusters are being built and run.”